On 2001-01-31 10:18, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>OpenMined <**Mail Free America**> wrote:
>: Looks very promising for image manipulation. However, does not
>: apparently satisfy the licensed GIF requirement.
>
>  Why is it so important that they have licensed GIF? If you live
>in a country where (idiotic) program patents can be made and unisys
>has patented LZW there, you'll have to get the license for yourself
>anyways, independent of whether imagemagick has the license or not.

Unisys doesn't care whether the licence is payed by the vendor of
the software or the user. For commercial software, the vendor pays
some amount for every copy sold, so the user doesn't have to pay. For
software distributed for free, obviously the programmer can't pay some
fee to Unisys for every download, so theoretically the user has to pay.

BTW, some time ago I looked up the fee on Unisys home page. It was
pretty low (a few dollars at most), and I considered actually paying it
(although I live in a country where to my knowledge LZW isn't patented)
- handling costs for a single user licensing a single copy of a single
program would definitely cost them more than they earn - imagine a few
hundred thousand people from all over the world inquiring how they can
pay, sending them the money in strange ways, and Unisys loses 100 bucks
on each transaction ;->

	hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | All Linux applications run on Solaris,
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR       | which is our implementation of Linux.
| |   | hjp### [at] wsracat      | 
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |	-- Scott McNealy, Dec. 2000

Post a reply to this message